Big Third Inning Lifts Georgia to 10-2 Win Over Bama / Bama wins today 4-1

This team is no where near playing with the composure that they were playing with just a short time ago. They had an ugly meltdown at Mississippi State over there and now something very similar at home and the sad part about it is, the defense started both of the debacles.

Bama needs at least two solid pitchers to make any noise at all in the upcoming SEC tournament and the NCAA Regional Tournament. Traina , I think, pitched her best game of the season Friday night in the win over Georgia and this should have served as a great momentum builder for the team in trying to sweep the 3 game series with Georgia. The sweep of Georgia would have locked Bama in for hosting a Regional Tournament, which is a big advantage for the host team. Leslie Jury laid another egg last night and this seems to be her signature in pressure games. She cannot be relied on to be the second pitcher in the rotation.

Bama has a third pitcher, Sydney Littlejohn who is a freshman. She has shown a lot of promise when she has pitched but she also exposed herself in the Mississippi State game with mental letdown and Jury has shown but she is a freshman. In the game last night as Jury started to dig herself into a big hole, I thought CPM would give the freshman a chance to come out and douse the fire that Georgia had started but he chose not to and things really got ugly. With the substitution rules that softball has, a pitcher can be replaced but can reenter the game later if the coach so chooses to do this. I thought this was a very opportune time to test the freshman for future purposes and let her replace Jury because Jury was a train wreck at the time but this never happened and a grand slam home run followed, game over.

I am sometimes too quick to point fingers at players when bad things happen on the field and I might have been doing them an injustice. I have to compare the meltdown last night to the recent one at Mississippi State because of the similarities of the games and I can see that the players made the same type of mistakes again and I have to blame that on poor coaching. This team has played too many games this year to be making those type of "little league" mistakes and this could be the reason that I don't think this team right now will go very far in the upcoming tournaments. Maybe if Littlejohn was moved to the 2 slot in the pitching rotation but then Jury would have to be depended on to be the firetruck of the team to save some games. Who knows, this might fit her in a better role with the mental side of her game but CPM has got to do something because what he has now isn't working if their goal is to make it to Oklahoma City.

I'll be there rooting for them and hopefully something will change for betterment of the team. Today's game is much bigger than last night's was due to the loss last night and Traina will be in the circle, hopefully that will be the difference for a big win today. Roll Tide!!